Loneliness, def.

If you could choose between the experience of the substance of life and the ability to communicate it, which would you choose?

Me too.

Social Virtue

Here is a man to whom all are drawn as to the source of all laughter, as to the bottom of all slopes, as to the movement to which all words point. Brightest of smiles, glibbest of lips, his whole personality implying answers to all of life’s despairs. Everyone is in love with him, and he likewise is in love…not with them, nor with himself (straight shot through subtleties of vanity)—but with their love for him.

The irony of his character is as sharp as his wit, and the deepest of gazes will send the onlooker into a despair more profound than the happy heights are high to which he escorts his adorers: for it is he who loves the crowd’s attention—who may be not infinitely virtuous but have rather an infinitely sensitive ear for an audience—who is most alone.

New Love

How transcendently beautiful it is to have someone constitute a significant part of your life, rather than a pillaged whole.

(The individual must be partially submerged in silence, to have a piece of life to himself.

Full commitment to any Thing is self’s cheap sale, though they will bargain incessantly for your soul.

You must learn the bully’s bluff: that anything but God has a claim on your time.

One must live for the ideal, the ideal for which one can live and die.)

I have learned to live for little things.

Banishment

Creative people used to grow organically out of their time and place, to the point that the virtue of creativity was trueness to one’s roots. And people affirmed “their” artist to the extent that his words sprang from their spring, that he sang their song with a voice they didn’t have. And that was the criterion for good art as well: trueness to oneself, which translated then to trueness to one’s culture.

Only stratified romantics could still idealize the present world this way. The only good artists left are the suicides—those who are utterly alienated from their surroundings and heritage. Proust barricaded himself in an egg carton-lined room, Kafka couldn’t stand his father, Dostoevsky drank himself to death and Tolstoy ran away. It’s like some damn demented nursery rhyme.

Pan to ancient Greece, where plays were the center of city-wide festivals, where poets and playwrights were lauded for their patriotism and grace. I’m not lamenting the loss of culture (pretense of the elitist), but pointing to a radical difference in art’s place in society—which, art being a compass of culture’s illness, points to something more significant.

Because to be an artist, these days, is to banish oneself from the world—not opprobrium, but something much worse: invisibility. Quite appropriate, too, for the artist toils in the realm of the spirit, melds the mind to beauty—traffics in invisible wares—while society either scrounges for the capitalist’s crumbs or feeds the system with a nihilistic materialism that starves the spirit into ironic submission.

And so alienation is the artist’s self-prescription, choosing solitude and bitter loneliness over a high place among the damned. In that sense, art is still a product of the times, for man is utterly alienated from himself, and thus the artist represents the conscience of humanity, calling out in an eloquent whisper drowned in the hidden howling of despair. He is not alienated, but walked away from.

Hide/Seek

The dead make quiet claims on existence,

Gazes glowing less with dust and distance.

Few can pass passion through fashion's fall, pall

Of past's silence which is breath's death to haul.

Dusk's true danger descends on those who hide

From the night in brighter lives. I tried

And found only pell-mell smells of meaning,

Plus a cold sweat at threat of solitude's weaning.

But behind your eyes the sea's reasons speak

To salt's sharp sparkle on a beach's cheek--

And I am afraid of this foreign tongue,

Lapping clapping language as a sea's song sung.

Your nocturnal churnings, you too light to see,

Your laughter darkly blooming: I will let them be.

Come with me.

Newness

Life is predicated on a paradox—perhaps defined by contradiction. The true, earnest life is lived in the crunch of contradictory concepts, in the space between the ease of ideas, where the gaze of immanence blanks in the blind spot.

And that spot is a skinny slice of the pie, too, for our self-reductive thrust toward simplification is more clever than we. (It has to be, if we are to survive.) The world is a puzzle, and we crave predictability. The drive to interpret our experience within the meager framework of our own knowledge amounts to less than we would expect: the bright epiphany of a conscious click, when the mind bluffs comprehension, amounts to the assimilation of novelty to the past’s easy distinctions, which in their turn were likewise reduced from their dazzling mosaic. That is, most meaning is gleaned by assimilating perception to past patterns. Striking reduction, that. Life makes sense in light of itself, and we proud knowers, who nonetheless so little know ourselves, walk past the circularity in weightless relief.

So what is human nature? Here is a humble suggestion for you: insecurity.

And what occurs if we simply let confusion profuse? We could stand outside the institutions screaming for our allegiance (that noble raping of uniqueness); stop this shameful cowering in the corners of life where we cling to broken toys of distinctions; the individual could recognize himself as irreparably such and stroll into the mystery of his particularity. What if we see the self’s strangeness in relation to a given situation—and, though tempted to pretense of familiarity, as blind men greet this quiet comer with quiet joy?

...Then we might add a new jingle to our pocket full of rhymes: change.